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Purdue's president let his letter do the talking on how Purdue was handling race and free speech. But as students look to rally, plenty of people were reading between the lines.

Deciphering what Purdue President Mitch Daniels was getting at when he issued a statement in the wake of race-related events at University of Missouri and Yale became a bit of a parlor game on the West Lafayette campus.

First, hand it to Daniels. On Wednesday, he skipped the lead of other university presidents who have hunkered down and pretended Mizzou, Yale and the lingering questions about race that put them on this week’s map were hundreds of miles away.

Instead, Daniels issued a two-paragraph statement to the Purdue community, touting two aspirations on the West Lafayette campus: “… to be, without exception, a welcoming, inclusive and discrimination-free community;” and “to be steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.” On both fronts, Daniels pointed to student-led efforts on a “We Are Purdue Statement of Values” and the university’s new free speech policy, both coming in the past two years.

“What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale,” Daniels wrote to students, faculty and staff.

But there are so many moving parts in the roiling controversies at Missouri — featuring mass protests, a hunger striker, a football team ready to boycott and a president’s resignation — and Yale — boiling down to a confrontation between students and faculty members over advice on racially sensitive Halloween costumes — that Daniels’ words fed the parlor game.

And that speculation rolled into Thursday, even as some Purdue students made plans to walk out of class at 2:15 p.m. Friday and rally near the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall in support of the cause at Missouri.

Was it a comment about student movements on campus? Was it a slam against faculty and staff at Missouri who tried to manhandle media in misguided attempts to create safe zones for student protesters? Was it woe over a movement fed by protest rather than discussion? Whose free speech are we talking about in the cases at Yale and Missouri? Is it a statement about a college football team having that much power? Does it mean Daniels thinks Tim Wolfe got a raw deal when the president of the University of Missouri system stepped down?

Asked to decipher it, Daniels declined. Through a spokesman on Thursday, he said he didn’t have anything personally to add to what he’d already said — only that he feels he can’t “emphasize enough the importance of inclusivity in our community.”

But that didn’t keep the national press from giving Daniels’ statement some traction — plus some interpretation that helped show how tricky things are for Purdue and other U.S. universities right now.

The Wall Street Journal minced no words about its disdain for political correctness on campus in a short editorial posted shortly after Daniels sent his letter: “We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, spoke up Wednesday about the children’s revolt at Yale and Missouri …”

And from the Left, Think Progress put its assessment right in this questionable headline: “Good Thing We’re Not Like Mizzou Or Yale, Says President Of University Plagued By Racism.”

Wes Bishop, a graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts, is a member of the Purdue Social Justice Coalition, which is helping organize Friday’s rally and a social media campaign under the hashtag #HowManyMoreFires. He questioned the opinion “that Purdue is some kind of paradise” compared to Mizzou.

“At first glance, he is appearing to take a stance against the racism at places like Mizzou, but by including Yale in his statements he seems to be making a veiled argument against activism that criticizes racist actions,” Bishop said. “I personally think it is a case of speaking out of both sides of your mouth.”

Then there’s this, from Linda Prokopy, a natural resources professor and member of the University Senate’s Equity and Diversity Committee, which is drafting a statement reaffirming the faculty’s commitment to making Purdue a safe and inclusive environment.

“You could probably read a lot into what he said, one way or another,” Prokopy said. “To me, it’s benign. … I reread it a couple of times and couldn’t read anything sinister into it. And I like to try to read sinister things into what Daniels does. But I really wasn’t able to.”

Positioned somewhere between the adult in the room and an enabler of marginalization, Daniels wasn’t elaborating.

Like so much of the debate over race and bias on campus, he left it to the eye of the beholder.